People Are Using Wplace For Video Game-Related Protests

Online collaborative pixel art platform Wplace has had many users drawing images from video games, but it’s also being used as a platform for video game-related protests.

Heavily inspired by r/place on Reddit, users can paint any location of the world map with pixels of any color, which has inspired some people to air their grievances through pixel art. As reported by Eurogamer, the location of Riot Games’ headquarters in Santa Monica has been targeted with a large art piece accompanied with the message “#SaveHytale” and the Hytale logo.

Riot Games is the owner of the studio Hypixel, which announced the cancellation of the Minecraft-inspired sandbox game in June after a decade of development. The developer had also announced the winding down of operations.

Similarly, Dragon Age fans have also taken to Wplace to protest EA (via TheGamer) following reports that that proposals for a remaster of the Dragon Age Trilogy had been rejected by the publisher. Instead of targeting EA’s headquarters, fans have taken over the Scottish town of Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands, sharing the same name as the city in Dragon Age 2, where pixel art of Dragon Age fan art and “F–k EA” messages can be seen.

Wplace is a collaborative pixel art project created by Murilo Matsubara, and since its launch on July 21, anyone can paint on the world map made up of four trillion pixels. While users start with just a limit of 30 pixels, 1 pixel is recovered every 30 seconds.